


For All Your Tomorrows

by sneakertime



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Destroy Ending, M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Reaper War
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-28
Updated: 2014-09-28
Packaged: 2018-02-19 00:20:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2367362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sneakertime/pseuds/sneakertime
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After Shepard is released from hospital, he and Kaidan spend an evening in post-war London together. Kaidan proceeds to worry about more or less everything.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For All Your Tomorrows

‘Are you sure about this?’ Kaidan asked for what felt like the hundredth time, even as his hand slid under the hem of Shepard’s thin grey cotton t-shirt. His palm ghosted over the small of the other man’s back, then lingered guiltily on the raised skin of the long, thin scar wrapped around Shepard’s left shoulder-blade

‘Positive,’ Shepard insisted. He’d already manhandled Kaidan’s uniform jacket off him, admittedly a little awkwardly. His fractures had taken a long time to heal, and his joints were stiff and uncooperative. So he wouldn’t be entering a triathlon anytime soon, so what, he’d insisted. Despite what Kaidan thought Shepard was adamant that didn’t mean that _all_ vigorous activity had to be off the menu.

They kissed – carefully, slowly, but no less intensely for it – and Kaidan’s hands moved to Shepard’s waist, holding him steady. He seemed so much thinner now, when just three months before he’d been all lithe muscle. But, as Kaidan reflected grimly, that’s what you got for a month in a coma and another two in ongoing recovery. An unwelcome image sprang to the forefront of Kaidan’s mind - John in a hospital bed surrounded by medical equipment, space-pale skin even whiter than usual against the sterile sheets.  

The memory was a bit of a mood killer. It was too soon the fretful part of Kaidan’s mind insisted, John wasn’t healed yet. He’d probably never again be as fit and athletic as he had been, you just didn’t bounce back from the kind of damage his body had taken during that god-awful final showdown on the Citadel. But he’d be better than this, all he needed was a bit more recovery time, and then maybe they could think about…

‘I can practically hear you overthinking this Major,’ Shepard said peevishly, breaking away from the kiss that Kaidan had been less than wholly committed to. ‘Kaidan, come on, how many times do I have to tell you that I’m _fine_? I’m not going to break in two.’ He kissed Kaidan soundly on the mouth. ‘I’ve been stuck in a damn hospital for the last three months, don’t I deserve a little R &R?’

‘I’m just worried about you,’ Kaidan tried to tell him, even as Shepard’s hands continue to wander. ‘I’m just not sure now is the right time, that’s all…’

‘Don’t you want to?’ Shepard asked, pulling away suddenly, brow furrowed.

‘Hey, of c _ourse_ I want to,’ Kaidan said, reaching out and putting his hands around Shepard’s face. And god, it was true. He wanted to so badly that he dreamt about it practically every night. They’d had such little time together like _that_ before the final assault on Earth, not nearly enough to really, thoroughly… well. Just not enough time. Not enough of anything really.  ‘It’s just…’

‘It’s just…’ Shepard mimicked him fondly. ‘You keep on saying that, so here’s my take on it, okay? It’s just that we’ve survived hell and back, it’s just that it’s a damn miracle we’re even alive, it’s just that we’ve finally got some alone time together and nobody is going to disturb us…’

‘It’s just that you might keel over at any moment…’ Kaidan added, although he couldn’t help but smile at Shepard’s good natured admonishment.

‘The only way I’m going to keel over is if you shove me onto a bed,’ Shepard reassured him. ‘That was a hint by the way. No, make that an order.’ He wrapped his arms around Kaidan’s waist and pulled them close until their foreheads were pressed together.

‘Don’t I outrank you now?’ Kaidan teased.

‘I got promoted,’ Shepard objected.

‘But it’s not official yet is it? So technically you should be taking orders from me.’

‘Well feel free to abuse your authority,’ Shepard said, before finally pressing their mouths back together.

It felt so good to finally get what he had been wanting for such a long time, that this time Kaidan just let himself go along with it. They broke apart only long enough for Kaidan to pull the grey t-shirt off over John’s head, slowly working their way out the cramped ‘living room’ of the tiny emergency pre-fab housing that the Alliance had quartered Kaidan in after the Normandy limped its way back home, and into the equally cramped bedroom.

Nobody shoved anybody onto the narrow bed. Instead Kaidan waited until Shepard was sat on the uncomfortable, military issue mattress before he moved to join him, the both of them carefully arranging themselves until their bodies were pressed together comfortably. They took it slow, letting their hands and mouths wander, allowing a slow but intense friction to build between them. Eventually they shifted so that Kaidan was on top of John, and then they finally started to pick up the pace a little.

Things were going well, _very_ well, when suddenly they moved together in just the wrong way, and the next moment John was cursing vehemently and pushing Kaidan away, his hand pressed tightly to a spot just above his hip. Kaidan recognised it as the place where, when Harbinger had fired its immense energy weapon on the ruins of London, a piece of Shepard’s own armour had been blasted into shrapnel and embedded itself right into his side. Just one of a depressingly long catalogue of injuries John had sustained that day, each one of which would probably have been enough to kill someone less enormously stubborn.

Kaidan smothered the urge to fuss and fret at him, knowing it would only put Shepard into a bad mood. Instead he waited until the pained tension slowly ebbed from Shepard’s body, until they were just sitting awkwardly next to each other on the bed, both completely undressed.

‘Am I allowed to say ‘I told you so’?’ Kaidan asked, trying to keep his tone light and failing miserably.

Shepard groaned and ran a hand over his face. ‘No,’ he said flatly.

Helping John put his clothes _on_ hadn’t been where Kaidan had been hoping the night would go, but that’s where it ended up. Afterwards Shepard slunk off to sit outdoors. Kaidan grabbed a couple of beers (a luxury item these days, being a hero had its advantages) from the fridge and followed him.

There were lots of other emergency pre-fabs around Kaidan’s little ‘house’, all Alliance military. He was lucky to have a space to himself - most of the other marines were all quartered in cramped barracks. Only the top brass had individual living spaces. Kaidan wasn’t sure how he had managed to score one, but figured it was either his Spectre status, or someone had spilled the beans about his relationship with Shepard.

The pre-fabs, through durable, were pretty claustrophobic, so lots of people had moved their tables and chairs outside. The weather was warm, even during the evening, and John and Kaidan were far from the only people sitting out in the fresh air. A few people glanced over in their direction and started muttering to each other excitedly. Kaidan wondered how long it would take before the news that the famous Commander Shepard was not only on site, but was shacked up with Kaidan Alenko would be all over the camp. An hour or less if Kaidan was any judge - the speed of light had nothing on the speed of top-quality scuttlebutt.

Kaidan hesitated for a moment before handing John the second beer, suddenly struck with the alarming thought that the alcohol might mess with the laundry list of meds the man was on. Shepard’s eyes narrowed - as if reading Kaidan’s thoughts - and he reached out and forcibly plucked the beer from Kaidan’s frozen hand.

‘Sorry,’ said Kaidan sheepishly, sitting down in the chair next to Shepard’s.

‘I don’t need to be treated like a damn invalid,’ Shepard snapped moodily. Then the very next moment the scowl faded from his face. ‘Sorry,’ he apologised softly. He sighed, and pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and finger. ‘I _am_ a damn invalid, aren’t I?’

‘You’re not,’ Kaidan said. ‘You’re recovering, that’s all.’

‘Same thing.’

‘No, it’s not,’ Kaidan said patiently. ‘You’re not injured anymore, but you’re not fighting fit either. You just have to wait it out.’

Shepard frowned and tilted his head back to look up at the night sky. The moon was behind them, hidden by the huge bulk of the camp’s HQ, and in its absence the sky was dominated by the ruin of the Citadel in orbit. It glowed - or rather the small army of ships that surrounded it did.

‘Think they’ll ever figure out how to move it back?’ Shepard asked. Never one to indulge in self-pity his brief bad mood seemed to have lifted already.

‘From what I hear it doesn’t sound like it,’ Kaidan said. ‘7.11 billion tons of space station is hard to shift apparently.’

Almost absent-mindedly Shepard reached out across the space between their chairs and took Kaidan’s free hand in his, linking their fingers together loosely.

‘It’s so strange seeing it up there,’ he said.

Locked in a geo-synchronous orbit above London, the Citadel was visible at night to most of northern Europe.  For Earth it would be an eternal reminder of the Reaper War, Kaidan reflected. A memorial hanging right there in the sky.

‘A lot’s changed,’ Kaidan said simply, as though the thought had only just occurred to him. He’d seen the galaxy torn apart around him, but he’d never really stopped before to think that, even if they won, there was no going back. The Citadel in the sky was just the largest obvious reminder. Trillions were dead. The krogan, freed of the genophage, would either build a civilization for themselves or rampage across the galaxy. The batarians were now a race of refugees. The quarians were no longer a race of refugees.  Everywhere you looked new ground was being forged – for better or for worse. The future had never been so uncertain.

Shepard squeezed his hand. ‘Don’t think so hard Kaidan,’ he said dryly. ‘I can practically see the smoke coming out of your ears.’

Kaidan laughed and squeezed his hand back. Shepard turned his head to look at him and grinned. For one moment he looked hale and hearty again, not thin and tired and ill.

Change, Kaidan considered, didn’t have to be a bad thing at all. Just because the future was uncertain, it didn’t follow that it was going to be unhappy. John would heal, and then who knew what they would do, or where they would go? There was a whole galaxy that needed putting back together out there.

Kaidan’s mind turned once more to a subject it had been brooding over more and more as the days went by and Shepard got stronger. A question he was contemplating the right time to ask. He’d nearly blurted it out a couple of times before, in the brief, quiet moment before the last mad charge in London, and then again when Shepard had woken up from his coma.  Neither time had felt like the _right_ moment, but Kaidan was starting to wonder if there was a right moment. When you had come so close to losing it all, maybe waiting around for the perfect time to ask was a fool’s game.

He opened his mouth, in one mad moment intending to just blurt the question out and to hell with the consequences – but he only got as far as ‘John…’ before a loud noise across the camp interrupted him. It was just a shuttle touching down, its thrusters firing deafeningly for a couple of seconds until it finally hit dirt. It was hard to see properly from this kind of a distance, but Kaidan thought that it looked turian.

‘How’s the dextro food supplies coming along?’ Shepard asked, prompted by the sight of the turian vessel and completely derailing Kaidan’s line of thought.

‘Faster. They’re synthesizing a couple of tons of the stuff every day now.’ Even though the Citadel Council were all dead,  being a Spectre obviously still meant something to somebody, because Kaidan had been receiving daily updates on all kinds of pressing concerns, including the dwindling food supplies of the turian fleet.

‘Garrus says it tastes like an unwashed krogan’s backside. His exact words.’

‘I don’t even want to think about how he knows what a krogan’s backside tastes like. And if he’s got a better solution I’m sure the brass would love to hear it.’ The quarians had been sharing some of their own dextro-based food with the turians, but were starting to get touchy about ‘hard-working quarians going hungry so that turian bellies get filled’ to quote one particularly belligerent admiral of the Migrant Fleet.

In fact everywhere you looked people were getting touchy about something. They wanted to go home, a desire Kaidan could fully understand and sympathise with. The Mass Relay was fried, and even at light speed the trip from Earth to Palavan would take millennia. Everyone was stuck here in one big unhappy melting pot, and tensions were starting to boil over. The war had united the galaxy against a common threat, but with that threat defeated old grievances and prejudices were rearing their ugly heads again.

It gave Kaidan a damned headache thinking about it. They were supposed to win the war, and then all their troubles would be over. In a perverse kind of a way he missed the certainty of fighting the Reapers - at least then he’d known who the enemy were and what he was supposed to do about it. He was a soldier, fighting was what he was good at, not sorting out petty squabbles over who got the last cache of eezo in the stockpile.

‘You okay there?’ John asked suddenly, stirring Kaidan from his morose thoughts. ‘You zoned out on me.’

‘Yeah,’ Kaidan muttered. ‘Sorry. Just thinking.’

‘About?’

‘What a mess everything is,’ said Kaidan with a sigh. He tipped his head back to look up at the Citadel again. He wondered if that café on the Presidium had survived. Maybe someone would reopen it one day. Perhaps he’d take John back there, see if they could actually get some Canadian lager this time.

‘Never thought about this did we?’ Shepard said. ‘What would come afterwards? I guess we weren’t really expecting there to be an afterwards.’

Kaidan looked over sharply at him. ‘You didn’t think we could win?’ he asked softly. Shepard iron-clad conviction that the Reapers could be defeated had been the rock that they’d all clung to at some point or another during the war. He’d never pretended it would be easy, never pretended that there wouldn’t be a high cost to pay along the way, but he’d helped them all believe it was possible. That was what Shepard _did_ – he made the impossible possible.

The idea that it had all been a front put on for the benefit of the crew and Shepard’s own friends…

‘No, not that. I knew we could do it. I just... hell, I just assumed I wouldn’t live through it,’ Shepard admitted, with all the nonchalance of a man confessing to backing the wrong horse in the derby. It turned Kaidan’s stomach, and the crisp sharp taste of the beer in his mouth turned sour. He suddenly felt like an asshole for being irritated by the chaotic shambles of the post-victory aftermath. Anything – _anything_ – was better than John being dead.

Kaidan drank the rest of his beer in moody silence. He knew he brooded more on Shepard’s brush with death than Shepard himself did, but he thought he was justified. Those two years John _had_ been as good as dead had gone past in the blink of an eye for him – but only for him. Kaidan on the other hand had plenty of time to wade through the grief, the overwhelming rawness of it, and the slow, painful realisation that maybe the reason that it hurt so badly was because he’d felt more for Shepard than just friendship. And that it was much too late to do anything about it.

Before John he’d never been interested in men at all, and it had taken a while after Shepard’s miraculous return to the land of the living for Kaidan to convince himself that his feelings weren’t just misinterpreted admiration or hero-worship. Even when he was sure it had taken him a long time to work up the nerve to tell the man. He remembered thinking that they might all die tomorrow in a skirmish-gone-bad with Cerberus, and that at least he’d go out having given it a shot. Reciprocation had been almost too much to hope for – and yet…

When it got properly dark the temperature took a dive and they headed indoors. Somewhere in the camp someone was playing some music by a famous asari singer that Kaidan realised with a sudden jolt was very possibly dead now.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ John asked suddenly, sliding his arms around Kaidan’s waist and pulling him close.

‘Nothing,’ Kaidan lied badly. He tried to smile reassuringly, but Shepard looked totally unconvinced. He sighed and leant forward, resting his forehead on John’s shoulder. After a moment he felt a hand run gently through his hair.

‘Ignore me,’ he mumbled into Shepard’s t-shirt. ‘I’m just in one of those moods. Can’t stop thinking about how close we came to losing everything.’ Reflexively he wrapped his arms around Shepard, holding him as tightly as he dared. 

‘I’m right here,’ Shepard told him, irritatingly insightful, turning his head so he could speak softly right into Kaidan’s ear. ‘Alive and well.’

‘Alive, sure. Well? That one’s up for debate.’

Shepard took Kaidan’s head in his hands and turned his face so he could kiss him, slow and messy. One hand curled around the nape of Kaidan’s neck, then down across his shoulder, along the length of his spine, and finally palmed his ass.

‘Do I feel like an invalid to you?’ he murmured into Kaidan’s ear, pressing his body close. A warm curl of heat began to build between them, and Kaidan almost, _almost_ let himself go along with it.

‘I think you’re forgetting about what happened when we tried this earlier,’ he said, pushing Shepard away gently, but firmly. ‘You’ll hurt yourself.’

John scowled at him and turned away wordlessly, heading in the direction of the bedroom. He pulled his t-shirt off over his head as he went, and Kaidan got a quick glimpse of a lot of skin - marred here and there by scars, but still beautiful – before the door shut. Briefly he considered just going after him and kissing every last inch of that pale back, but instead he made himself sit down and watch a vid for a while, letting his mind be absorbed with something else other than turning his own thoughts over again and again.

About an hour later he finally slunk into the bedroom. John was in the bed, lying on his side facing away from Kaidan. It was impossible to tell if he was awake or asleep. Kaidan undressed quietly in the darkness, half-heartedly folding his uniform up and leaving it on top of a narrow set of drawers to put straight back on tomorrow, and awkwardly climbed in alongside Shepard.

They lay in silence for a while, pressed uncomfortably together side-by-side in the much too narrow bed. Finally Shepard huffed out a sigh and rolled over so that his arm was wrapped around Kaidan’s waist and the curve of his cheek was pressed into the crook of Kaidan’s neck. Kaidan hummed his approval, and put his arm across John’s shoulders to carefully pull the man even closer.

‘You know,’ Kaidan muttered softly after a while. ‘During the war I thought that, if we won, eventually the galaxy would go on as normal. I mean I knew it would take a long time to rebuild, decades even, but sooner or later things would be like they were. But it’s never going to go back, is it? Everything’s uncharted territory from here on out.’

‘That scare you?’ John asked, voice half-muffled by Kaidan’s collarbone.

‘A little,’ Kaidan admitted honestly. ‘But maybe it shouldn’t. Maybe we’ve got a chance to build a better world. What do you think?’

‘I don’t,’ said Shepard. ‘I’ve had enough of thinking about the fate of the galaxy. I’m taking a break. It can save its damn self.’

Kaidan chuckled and rolled onto his side, gently pushing Shepard over until they were lying facing each other.

‘All I’m trying to say is that the future is going to be different,’ he said. There was enough light filtering in through the bedroom’s shuttered window so that he could see Shepard’s face, watching him intently. ‘You know things change. For the better sometimes.’ He sighed. He was making a mess of it, just couldn’t seem to find the words he wanted.

‘Depends on your definition of better,’ Shepard said cynically. ‘Seems like everyone has a different idea of what that means right now.’

Kaidan sighed heavily. ‘Well that’s true,’ he admitted, thinking of all the petty disputes and not-so-petty disputes he found himself caught up in on a regular basis. ‘But I think everyone can agree that not standing of the brink of total galactic extermination is definitely better by anyone’s definition.’

‘I’ll give you that,’ John agreed. He peered searchingly at Kaidan though the dark, like he was trying to read his thoughts, and then suddenly sat up – wincing as he shifted his weight. ‘I don’t get what you’re driving at here Kaidan.’

Kaidan grimaced, hauling himself up so he was sitting next to Shepard. The camp had quietened down outside, apart from the far distant rumbling of a transport taking off. It even felt a little peaceful, sitting there in the dark, side-by-side with Shepard.

‘I don’t get what I’m driving at either,’ Kaidan confessed. Some half-baked impulse to ask John to marry him and spend the rest of their lives living quietly next to some lake in Canada, drinking beer and learning how to fish. Living the kind of simple uncomplicated life that would drive both of them stark raving mad within a handful of months.

They were, both of them, soldiers in their blood and always would be. The quiet life was not realistically on the cards, however alluring the idea might be when the world was lying in tatters around your feet. It was a dream – albeit an attractive one to mull over on the long, grim days when it seemed as though for every problem that got solved a dozen more sprang up to take its place. 

The marrying John bit, however, that part Kaidan was banking on not being quite so outlandish.

‘They’re working you too hard,’ Shepard admonished him quietly. Kaidan couldn’t help but laugh at this shameless piece of hypocrisy, as if Shepard’s own stress levels hadn’t been off the charts only a few months ago. At the time he’d obstinately refused to even acknowledge the problem, and Kaidan had worried incessantly that he was going to have some kind of silent breakdown behind closed doors.

‘Look who’s talking,’ he pointed out, knocking Shepard’s shoulder with his own.

‘True,’ Shepard admitted unrepentantly. He leaned forward and pressed a quick kiss to Kaidan’s bare shoulder, before burrowing back under the sheets. Kaidan followed his example, and they wound up lying half on top of each other again. After a few minutes Kaidan’s eyes grew heavy and his thoughts sluggish, as he slowly began to drift off to sleep.

He was just about to slip under completely when an almighty thunderous roar reverberated around the camp, and the room began to shake. John started violently at the sudden noise, grabbing Kaidan by the arm so tightly that it hurt before suddenly slumping back onto the mattress and releasing his death-grip.

‘It’s just that turian shuttle leaving,’ he mumbled.

Sure enough after a moment the roar subsided into a high pitched shriek as the shuttle gained some altitude, and then quickly faded away altogether.

‘Jesus Christ, there should be a reg about letting those things go when people are trying to sleep,’ Kaidan muttered darkly. His heart was hammering away in his chest, pumping round adrenaline that he really didn’t need when he was trying to get some rest. He fumbled round in the dark searching for the switch for the lights over the bed. They came on with a soft yellow glow.

Kaidan took a couple of slow, deep breaths and felt the edge of the adrenaline spike smooth out. His arm ached where John had grabbed it, clutching so hard that Kaidan was sure he was going to have bruises tomorrow.

‘You okay?’ he asked Shepard.

‘I’m fine,’ Shepard said. He pushed himself up to sit with his back braced against the headboard of the bed. His breathing was coming too fast, and when he tentatively held a hand out in front of him it trembled.

‘Stupid, isn’t it?’ John muttered bitterly. ‘After everything I’ve been through, why now? Why not after the Blitz? Or Mindoir? Or Jesus, after I _died_ …’

‘It’s not stupid,’ Kaidan admonished. ‘Would you say it was stupid if it was happening to anyone else?’

‘Even the strongest of us can only take so much,’ Dr. Chakwas had quietly told Kaidan one night in the field hospital. Every time he’d seen her she’d looked exhausted, but for months she’d dutifully dropped in on Shepard every few days, in order to personally monitor his recovery. She was still his physician she’d insisted stubbornly, and until she was officially reassigned she was going to do her duty and tend to her patient.

Kaidan wondered if you could still get Serrice Ice Brandy. He probably owed her a bottle.

Shepard did not look reassured. He clenched the hand that had trembled into a fist, and for one horrible moment Kaidan thought he was going to do something stupid like punch the wall. Before he could, Kaidan reached out and slid his own hand gently around John’s clenched fingers, and when Shepard turned his head sharply and drew breath to say something simply cut him off with a kiss.

For a moment Shepard remained as still and unyielding as a statue, but then his hand relaxed enough so that Kaidan could link their fingers together, and his mouth went pliant and soft. When he finally kissed back it was unexpectedly heated, his mouth opening up under Kaidan’s and his body pressing eagerly up against him.

For a while Kaidan allowed himself to get momentarily lost in the feeling of John warm and vital in his arms. But when Shepard began to half climb into Kaidan’s lap he was forced to summon up a large measure of self-control and gently push him back.

‘No,’ he mumbled against Shepard’s still insistent mouth. ‘You’re not ready for this…’

‘The hell I’m not,’ Shepard snapped back, somehow managing to get into Kaidan’s lap anyway, and pressed up together like this it was impossible for John _not_ to feel just how much Kaidan wanted him, regardless of what he might be saying.

‘I don’t want you to hurt yourself – _oh_ …’ he choked on his sentence when Shepard reached down between them and wrapped a sure and steady hand around Kaidan.

‘Just this I promise…’ Shepard murmured. ‘C’mon, let me, please…’

Kaidan was too far gone to really protest, could only sit there and gasp as Shepard brought him off with embarrassing swiftness. It had been too long, and it felt so damn _good_. The blood pounded in his ears, his breathing went ragged, and he had to bite down on his lip to stop himself from speaking out loud the words that were rising up dangerously in his throat. They went round in his head anyway – _I love you, I love you, marry me, don’t ever go away again…_

He came with a cry that he muffled into the skin of Shepard’s shoulder.

‘See?’ Shepard said obstinately afterwards. ‘I’m still in one piece.’

Kaidan huffed in exasperation, and wrapped an arm around Shepard’s back. In on swift move he flipped them, carefully pushing Shepard down until he was laid out on his back. Kaidan leant down to kiss him hungrily, and then then returned the favour he’d just been paid.

Some while later, both of them unpleasantly sticky but too comfortable to move just yet, John rolled over so that he was plastered up against Kaidan’s side.

‘I missed you,’ he said. ‘Every time they made you leave, while I was in that damned hospital, I missed you.’

‘I missed you too,’ Kaidan said simply. He didn’t specify like Shepard had. He’d missed the man all the damn time. During the two years of death, and when Kaidan had been stuck alone for weeks at Huerta in ongoing recovery, and then after the final battle to take Earth, when Shepard had been MIA, presumed dead…

Tomorrow Kaidan would wake up next to John, and then he’d go out and try to solve the galaxy’s problems. John would slowly heal, and sooner or later they’d rope him into it too – except Shepard probably _would_ manage to solve everything. The impossible was his speciality, not Kaidan’s.

Maybe they’d go to that bar on the Citadel, or try a spot of fishing round some Canadian lake. Maybe they’d go off-world. Maybe someone somewhere would figure out a way to knit together the broken backs of the mass relays, or hell, even figure out how to build new ones. One day they’d see Palavan again, or Thessia, or Rannoch…

Truthfully Kaidan had no goddamn idea where they’d be in a year from now, or a month, or hell perhaps not even tomorrow really. But for the first time in god only knew how long, he felt alright about that. 


End file.
